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Brainworm, I just want to say that reading this thread has inspired me to come up with new and different ways of approaching topics in the classes I teach. Thank you.
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Aug 24, 2009 17:22
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clredwolf posted:Brainworm, this type of information management seems to be extremely robust for certain situations. Groupwork and Technical Writing in particular seem to be excellent fits for these new types of collaborative tools. Do you think these tools will find uses in other areas too? Absolutely. Think about what Diane Ackerman calls "deep play" -- a sort of widely bounded activity that has both an inherent psychological and social value as well as as occasional, but unforseeable, instrumental ends. Good collaborative tools are a great deep playground. They put people in contact with one another, but bound what they can do in a way that encourages intellectually rewarding activity. So if I set up a wiki about adaptations of Classical drama, and I set it up right, I'm going to build a community of people who investigate Classical drama just because they want to contribute to the wiki. Why? Deep play. It's there, it's a challenge, and challenging things offer rewards that easy things can't. Eventually, more people are going to catch on to this. That's when you'll get these collaborative tools being adapted to fields in ways I can't even imagine. What I mean is, adoption of these tools doesn't need to be driven by a problem that needs a solution. It's just as likely -- maybe more likely -- that it'll be driven by people gaming for intellectual reward. quote:On that note, I'm becoming more and more interested in teaching engineering. I seem to have become a guru of sorts of my major, and people often come to me for help. I've come up with a number of ways to teach subjects that quite frankly I've not seen anywhere else. However, I'm having a very hard time coming up with ways to not make it so dry, even if the subject is thoroughly interesting to me. The best examples of engineering materials that aren't dry are self-help guides and Army/Navy guides for soldiers (and even then it's only marginally better than most textbooks). Do you have any insights on writing better textbooks (especially on technical material), or is that more or less a lost cause? I'ma give you three words, and maybe you've heard them before: Problem based learning. If you can write a textbook that gives professors and students a PBL-based approach to a discipline, you'll be halfway to writing the best one on the market. The other half is pretty simple, too. Especially in the sciences, textbook authors don't seem to know the difference between a reader and a reference. A reader is for reading. It explains material in clear, conceptual terms brief enough for a student to both memorize and easily handle -- a great example of this is Strunk and White's Elements of Style, which lays out eleven principles of writing in about thirty pages. You can remember all of them and, more important, apply all of them working off your own brainpower. Point is, a reader can be read cover to cover, and well-remembered. A reference is for referring to. It is, of necessity, anything that is not of a length that can be easily memorized and synthesized (i.e. committed to memory in a way that allows the manipulation of its principles, not just simple recollection). No sane person reads a reference cover to cover. That's not what it's for. To sort this out: There is no such thing as a three hundred page reader. If it's three hundred pages, it's a reference, and so should not be read over the course of a semester with the expectation that students will master any appreciable fraction of the information and skills that it presents. So when you write your textbook, keep this difference in mind. Make the section students read engaging, brief, weighty, and useful. Make the section students refer to easily navigable and modular (like a dictionary). If you can tie this to a PBL approach, you'll have a textbook so good you'll want to lick it.
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Aug 25, 2009 04:00
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BrideOfUglycat posted:Brainworm, I just want to say that reading this thread has inspired me to come up with new and different ways of approaching topics in the classes I teach. Thank you. Well, thank you. Writing it's done the same. Going off the last post, I'm thinking through ways to hit my advanced lit. students with a battery of field questions -- basically, something that mirrors the process in this thread, which is as close as you'll get to problem-based learning in English.
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Aug 25, 2009 04:05
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Brainworm posted:Absolutely. Think about what Diane Ackerman calls "deep play" -- a sort of widely bounded activity that has both an inherent psychological and social value as well as as occasional, but unforseeable, instrumental ends. Very interesting. I can see that concept applying to more than just Wikis, although those are probably the closest to 'deep play' we have today. Its like an information game. People play with the puzzle for fun, but end up making a picture appreciated by viewers inadvertently. I'm already imagining some extensions to this idea, like going through old german war documents to make social graphs of the german leadership (which is heavily fractured throughout the war). Or picking out relationship chains in a Facebook profile, and modeling human relationships over time in various settings. Brainworm posted:I'ma give you three words, and maybe you've heard them before: Problem based learning. If you can write a textbook that gives professors and students a PBL-based approach to a discipline, you'll be halfway to writing the best one on the market. Really good information, thanks. I've seen that methodology for teaching before, but never in book form for such technical material (it's usually just a teacher giving out problems from a normal book in PBL fashion). Gives me a good start. And I totally agree on reference vs. reader, I've heard several professors make the exact same complaint (textbooks try to be both). It seems very centric to the instructor though, as he/she has to drive the learning process. I can imagine some difficulty in applying that to a technical book and having it be taken seriously. Also I'd imagine it would be difficult for someone to learn by themselves from a PBL book if the instructor fails at instructing competently, unless the material is of really good quality and people realize they need to takle problems as a group. clredwolf fucked around with this message at 05:24 on Aug 25, 2009 |
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Aug 25, 2009 05:20
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The first time I heard of wikis as a classroom tool--probably just last year, God it seems longer though--it just clicked and seemed immediately right. Do you do a weekly Blackboard web-post-and-response deal, or is that effort focused on the wiki alone? I can still see roles for both--the web posts are the best place to float potential paper topics, while the wiki is more likely to be valuable going forward and more just plain fun.
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Aug 25, 2009 16:23
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Ok so this is literally the best thread I've ever read. No joke. So Brainworm, I'd appreciate it if you could listen to these two songs, which I'll list in chronological order: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJn984u4hos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj-mc2DkF7U and tell me if between the two, you see anything like "a conversation. You've got texts and responses, texts and responses, like Lear and Death of a Salesman. Without that, you don't have a literary tradition and -- more important -- you don't have artistic progress." I'll elaborate if you want but I'd rather see your first reaction. e: Oh but talking to an English professor, I should probably add that I'm talking about the music, not the lyrics. Try to listen to these like John Lennon would: "We don't write songs, we make records." That is, concern yourself primarily with "the sound." pyknosis fucked around with this message at 18:32 on Aug 25, 2009 |
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Aug 25, 2009 18:28
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elentar posted:The first time I heard of wikis as a classroom tool--probably just last year, God it seems longer though--it just clicked and seemed immediately right. Do you do a weekly Blackboard web-post-and-response deal, or is that effort focused on the wiki alone? I can still see roles for both--the web posts are the best place to float potential paper topics, while the wiki is more likely to be valuable going forward and more just plain fun. I never liked the mandated "post and respond" kind of collaboration, mostly because I think coursework should move backwards from a well-defined pedagogical goal. In the case of the wiki, the goal is clear: students need robust collaboration to do a particular kind of work. Just for instance, I've got a course starting this week where a bunch of students -- now something close to a dozen, -- are producing Othello. I mean researching background information, looking at other productions, hiring the actors and a director, and so on. One thing they need to do (and one thing most such production companies do ) is produce a vision statement -- a densely detailed document explaining what the production is doing, why it's doing it, and how the production company thinks this should be done. So a wiki makes sense on the back end, since the class has to split into teams to cover the research they need to guide the production. This is a tool that's clearly going to help them do their work better, so its inclusion in the course makes sense. In other words, this is a case where a collaborative reference document is superior to face-to-face meetings or more traditional forms of information sharing. I've haven't yet found a case where that's true of a post-and-respond sequence, though I imagine such cases exist. But in my classes, discovering paper ideas seems to work better in class discussion -- probably because classes are small. In a class where something structural keeps some students out of the conversation perforce, post-and-respond might make more sense. A second case for wikis over posts on e.g. Blackboard is that students like producing artifacts. If we have a sort of collaborative book they can take with them, morale seems higher. Their work doesn't disappear into some end-of-the-semester void. In that sense, a wiki is a more durable and more tangible. And it's possible to build a wiki that moves from class section to class section year after year, which is also kinda cool.
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Aug 25, 2009 23:57
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Boner Logistics posted:Ok so this is literally the best thread I've ever read. No joke. On a first listen, I think the way into these songs is the similarity between the call and response style guitar parts. In Cochran, this basically is a five-beat descending progression of a quarter, two sixteenths, and three more quarters on the bass and maybe a rhythm guitar (the call) followed by a triplet on a much brighter-sounding guitar (the response). In Zeppelin, this is both the guitar and bass playing what sounds like 4 1/2 beats of non-progressing eighth notes (the call) followed by the triplet (response). Someone with more music theory than I have (i.e. any) could probably name these qualities of the music better, but that's past me. Point is, these two riffs are rhythmically very similar, though Zeppelin's stripped instrumentation and non-progressing eighth notes makes me think they've deliberately simplified Cochran's riff while basically preserving it's rhythm. It's also interesting that Cochran's song doesn't have the rigid verse/chorus/verse structure you see in Zeppelin. There are lyrical and instrumental refrains, but so far as I can tell they're asynchronous. Except for the beat of silence after Cochran sings "nervous breakdown," the song as a whole doesn't follow a predictable pattern (although both the vocals and the instruments do). What's interesting is the way Zeppelin interprets this complexity -- for them, the verse is straight eighths, with no progression. And the song has a clear verse/chorus/verse structure, plus only one moment of silence (as opposed to Cochran's several). Again, the tenor of Zepplelin's song seems to be simplification. But what's really interesting is Zeppelin's chorus, which instrumentally (as far as I can tell) is a close variant of Cochran's original riff at double speed; the terminal triplet's muted ((X X _) and the lead-in eighth notes (Cochran's progression of quarter notes) ascends instead of descending. But rhythmically, again, Cochran's riff and Zeppelin's chorus riff are basically rhythmic twins. Zeppelin's is just double time. So what I'm seeing in Zeppelin is a lot of monkeying with Cochran's signature riff -- the furthest I can take it is that the title of the song, "Communication Breakdown," is partly a description of it's relationship to Cochran; he says something, and they say it back differently -- messing with the progression of notes but keeping the rhythm intact. I think that's basically consistent with the lyrics in the chorus. Communication breakdowns are always the same -- except the music suggests they're not, they're really variations on a theme, roughly analogous to the relationship between a "nervous breakdown" and being "driven insane." But I'm not going to put too much weight there. Song lyrics can swing in all kinds of directions. But what to make of the musical simplification, I don't know. Simplification, in fact, is probably not the right word. Zeppelin strips down Cochran's music, for sure, but whether this is supposed to represent a sort of self-deprecating musical regression (e.g. we'll never be as good as the ones who came before us) or a showpiece for a deliberately minimal musical presentation (e.g. we've stripped this music down to what really matters) is an open question. But given the content of the photos and video, I'ma think the second's closer to the mark. Cochran's photos always have him posed, in costume, with backgrounds and so on -- in them, he's a showman. Zeppelin, though, has a video about as barren of those things as you can get. It's a straight gray background, no models listening to them play on park benches, no sequined vests, and so on. Plus, other moments (the backing vocals at the end, which Cochran doesn't have at any point) make me think Zeppelin's invoking Cochran just enough to show how thoroughly they're rejecting everything about his music. Again, this is a once through from a guy whose greatest musical accomplishment is playing the piano on absinthe. I can't name the parts of these songs well enough to really dig into the relationships between them. It's like doing neurosurgery with a butter knife. Also, glad you like the thread.
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Aug 26, 2009 02:54
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What are your opinions on slam poetry?
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Aug 26, 2009 03:00
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Danny Cadaver posted:What are your opinions on slam poetry? It's funny. Every time I want to say that slam poetry's vapid posturing, and maybe not so far from from Rudy Ray Moore doing "Hurricane Annie," two things happen: 1) I see a slam poet, like from out of nowhere, who's a legitimately good reader/performer, and 2) I remember that the quality of poetry in general isn't what I'd like it to be. I guess what I mean is that slam poetry's popularity brings in talent that you don't see at regular poetry readings, and that other poets posture just as much as slammers. And criticizing slam because most -- maybe the overwhelming majority -- of slam poets are terrible is also off target. The overwhelming majority of poets are terrible. So singling out slam poetry, sound poetry, or any other subgenre, that's an easy way to miss the point. But it's funny, because I went to Youtube for a good slam poet -- someone to back my point (1) -- and found this. I mean, OK. So Youtubeing for slam poetry's opening Pandora's box. But this one doesn't even have any hope at the bottom. Just Adam Sandler. If I'ma criticize slam for anything, it's validating this kind of fuckwittery.
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Aug 26, 2009 04:13
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Brainworm posted:Again, this is a once through from a guy whose greatest musical accomplishment is playing the piano on absinthe. I can't name the parts of these songs well enough to really dig into the relationships between them. It's like doing neurosurgery with a butter knife. Hey, that was surprisingly detailed and sensitive. You definitely caught on to a good "way into" the songs, and I agree with most of what you said. I'll elaborate on that if you're interested (or even if you're not, probably...) but that'll be tomorrow since it's late and I like to do it properly. Anyways, in ten years I bet this thread will have had quite an impact on my career. It's been very enlightening about grad schools and academia and what kind of job I want to look for (yours, more or less). And you've pushed me towards some good research, too. I just finished a big theory project on the Beatles. That's an unorthodox subject, especially in my department, and I ran with it based on some vague understanding that something's wrong with how the music they have us study is chosen. Then when you started talking about canonicity and whatnot, I realized that's where the problem is in our undergraduate music education. Our curriculum is secretly all about this particular canon of Western art music, but students are coming expecting something very different and leaving disappointed. Now that I'm armed with that, I'm buffing up my paper to get it ready for conferences. Hell yes. So, thanks again. And a question. All your talk about general education made me wonder what it's like at your school. Are you in any position to get changes going in gen. ed.? Have you tried and failed? Is it just screwed up beyond repair? Brainworm posted:But it's funny, because I went to Youtube for a good slam poet -- someone to back my point (1) -- and found this. poo poo man that's deep, there's like, metaphors and stuff 
pyknosis fucked around with this message at 04:20 on Aug 26, 2009 |
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Aug 26, 2009 04:16
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Alright let's start with this:Brainworm posted:they've deliberately simplified Cochran's riff while basically preserving its rhythm. Actually there are some quite interesting changes made to this riff, in terms of rhythmic grouping. Here I'll attempt to notate the rhythm in Cochran's: pre:d d d d d ! ! ! ! ! 1 e + a 2 e + a 3 e + a 4 e + a The d's group into three trochees. That's made clear by the attack in the bass, as well as by the drums / claps. In the last trochee (d!!!), its last beat overlaps with the upbeat of the "much brighter-sounding guitar," which is an amphibrach (!!! ! !). I'm very confident calling it an amphibrach because of how the first beat is linked to the second by those three sixteenths. If you're not following (or even if you are) then give this a listen:  The amphibrach changes the grouping, but doesn't upset the pulse or beat at all. Everything is very neat and tidy, with an eighth note beat and everything falling right where you'd expect it to. Now here's Zeppelin's: pre:d d d d d d d d d ! ! ! 1 e + a 2 e + a 3 e + a 4 e + a More audio clarification:  What's a syncopation? Well, note that in Cochran, the "e + a" in the third beat were unaccented (like you'd expect), but in Zeppelin that "e" after 3 gets a heavy accent. That's the syncopation -- an accent that disrupts the beat. Zeppelin's gets a pulse going, but there's no neatness or tidyness. Those undifferentiated sixteenths with ambiguous grouping, might seem odd. Such ambiguous groupings are pretty common in classical music, coming in transitional sections and build-ups and such. But it's significant that so much of CB is made from such a section. It creates a great deal of instability and motion that makes us expect a resolution, an arrival at a more steady beat. We never get it, though, as the figure repeats over and over. Nothing falls right where you'd expect it to. Zeppelin changed the harmonic content of the riff too. It's pretty obvious from my acoustic attempts-at-playing-them that they aren't the same notes. So let's look at that. Cochran's riff is a very simple IV6/4 - I statement. That's something that changes the chord, but just barely. Really it's just an embellishment on the tonic chord, and a very standard one at that. It's been around since Bach and has been used heavily ever since. It's purpose is to be lyrical and smooth, which it is. The whole riff follows all the harmonic "rules" to a tee, which is another way of saying it does what we expect it to, no surprises. Zeppelin makes a very surprising change to a bVII chord. There are low E's (representing the tonic chord) followed by bVII - IV - bVII. Obviously there are more chords and thus more motion here. But the bVII chord in particular is an odd choice, since that chord is not in the key of E major. "Breaking the rules" like that gives you a harsher, bolder, more surprising effect. This riff is less lyrical, and not smooth at all. It's all about impact, and that suits the changes Zeppelin made to the rhythm quite nicely. Similar changes were made at the refrain. Cochran's refrain, which is what I'm calling the part that starts "Ah see mah hayands start tuh shivvah," is entirely typical. Typical blues rock chords, typical blues rock melody that follows the chords' contour, and a typical blues rock accompaniment. Oh and about that. You saw a link between Cochran's riff and the figure in Zeppelin's refrain, and a link definitely does exist. But instead of being directly connected, both are derived from that typical blues rock accompaniment. Audio clarification:  Cochran's refrain has that typical accompaniment figure, which puts everything into very regular and steady trochaic groups. And for a moment, Zeppelin's seems very similar. But then you get a huge accent on another wildly syncopated chord. It's so wild that it actually changes the rhythmic grouping, creating something end-accented. The melody supports this new grouping, laying its own accent right on top of that chord. Listen here:  Changing the rhythmic grouping of a figure we think we know is significant. It's especially so coming after the rhythmically unstable verse. Coming from the verse we expect a "resolution" in the refrain, a rhythmically stable place, and for half a second we think we get it. But really we never get it, not once in the whole song! We can look at the melodies too, though that's very difficult to do without notation. Suffice it to say that Cochran's follows all the rules that you'd expect it to. It even copies a few blues rock cliches. Nothing very remarkable, really. Zeppelin's breaks a few rules. Just like that odd bVII chord in the riff, the melody has some b7 scale degrees thrown in to tonic chord sections in the verse, where they don't "belong." There are some interesting dissonances on the first chord of the refrain too. Actually, this is what I just spent the summer researching in Beatles songs, and Zeppelin is doing this exactly like the Beatles did. But I really can't explain that properly via forum. One last place to look is in "Zeppelin's stripped instrumentation." It's interesting that you said that because both of these songs actually have the exact same instruments: guitar, bass, drums, voice, and a lead guitar that pokes in for a few isolated spots (the riff in Cochran, the solo in Zeppelin). But the songs do have very different textures. Cochran has strumming guitar and bass thumping quarters and a steady drum pattern (plus clapping) throughout. They're all doing something different, but they're all sticking to a single beat. We can call this kind of texture "layered" or "deep," especially when we compare it to Zeppelin's. There are guitar and bass in Zeppelin too, but they're reduced to that single note pulse most of the time. The bass follows the guitar directly through the refrain, and the drums mostly do the same. There's no "depth" or layering here. Instead, we have something very direct, forceful, and focused. And that suits the other differences we've seen. Lyrical music will have melodies that rest lightly atop a richly layered accompaniment, and Cochran is coming out of that tradition. But Zeppelin is doing something very different. So, you used the word "simplification," and it's not necessarily a bad word. I might say "distilled," actually. Look at what Zeppelin takes from Cochran. Cochran only had one tiny bit of electric guitar, and Zeppelin takes that and makes the whole song out of it. They take what they find interesting from the rock & roll style -- visceral lyrics, punchy guitar, driving rhythms, and so on -- and they leave out everything else, so you get a more concentrated product. That suits your idea that "Zeppelin's invoking Cochran just enough to show how thoroughly they're rejecting everything about his music." Cochran's writing was neat and tidy and hemmed in by rules, and Zeppelin took just enough from him to show that they were doing none of those things. I liked your observation about the visuals. Another good visualization of what Zeppelin's doing is in John Bonham, hitting his drums like they insulted him personally. But you know what, watching this video I posted, he's actually not doing that so much. Maybe you can watch an actual live performance if you're interested: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5etcNNOCVk If you do watch that, pay attention to how they end the song. The album version fades out, never giving you resolution to rhythmic stability, making the whole song feel like some crazy intense thing that just swept over you. Zeppelin can't fade out live, so they make an abrupt close on the main riff. But just before that, there's this little outro section, and that's what's interesting. They get into this sort of "jam" that actually creates a beat and gives us some rhythmic stability. Giving us that resolution is what signals to us that the song is closing. Oh and by the way, the reason I asked for your response was to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding the "conversation between texts" idea in some way. I didn't actually expect a detailed response, but I appreciate it. Oh and as long as you're answering questions, I'd be interested in how you wound up on the Something Awful Forums. I don't think any of my professors are goons (and I don't think I'd want to know even if they were)... pyknosis fucked around with this message at 20:39 on Aug 26, 2009 |
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Aug 26, 2009 20:22
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Apologies if this already was asked, I haven't had time to read the whole thread yet. I went to school on an athletic scholarship, and while I did well in my english, music, and history classes, maintained a fairly mediocre GPA due to laziness. I got into professional cooking at a high level with about 21 credits remaining before graduation and put school on hold. I'm going back to finish with a BA in english, with the goal of teaching English Lit, preferably in college. The one thing that could keep me stuck teaching high school is my GPA (around a 2.8 right now, but hopefully up to a 3.0 by graduation), is there any hope for me teaching college? Or are grad programs just too competitive? Great thread, it's been really interesting to read so far.
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Aug 26, 2009 21:30
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Great stuff lately. Keep it up, goons. So, I've started my Introduction to Theatre Arts (THE 101) this week, and I've had some success so far. One of our core assignments is a trio of response papers. The students see the three productions from the school's theatre season, and they write a paper for each responding to a particular prompt. Our final production this semester is Macbeth. For an introductory class, filled with students who are non-majors and may not have read Shakespeare, how much time would you goons spend going over the play specifically? We have time set aside to "teach" the play, and I'm wondering how much time you'd spend explaining and clarifying as opposed to articulating text points. I'm thinking I might set aside a couple of lecture periods (fifty minutes) to go through the script act by act, and explain/clarify plot points. After that, I think we might spend a day or two discussing specific thematic questions. How would you folks approach it?
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Aug 26, 2009 22:20
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Boner Logistics posted:Oh and as long as you're answering questions, I'd be interested in how you wound up on the Something Awful Forums. I don't think any of my professors are goons (and I don't think I'd want to know even if they were)... That was a nice reading of the songs. I swear I will never get tired of seeing people do things interesting and well. But yeah. I got on the forums as a grad student. Back in 2005, I spent some serious time in the hospital and had a seriously long recovery. That recovery started in '06 / early '07, and since I was too weak to move around like a normal person and eating out of an IV, I spent some equally serious time in front of the computer. I needed to bust out some articles so I could get a job. I had serious stacks of medical bills and a typical insurance company. So I found SA as I was finishing my dissertation. At the time and in that context, the Forums were quality reading. You know, a good way to break up writing and -- to be totally frank -- talk to other folks who've gone through similar kinds of sickness/hospital/insurance/long recovery processes.
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Aug 27, 2009 01:37
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Sound Tribe posted:Apologies if this already was asked, I haven't had time to read the whole thread yet. I went to school on an athletic scholarship, and while I did well in my english, music, and history classes, maintained a fairly mediocre GPA due to laziness. I got into professional cooking at a high level with about 21 credits remaining before graduation and put school on hold. I'm going back to finish with a BA in english, with the goal of teaching English Lit, preferably in college. The one thing that could keep me stuck teaching high school is my GPA (around a 2.8 right now, but hopefully up to a 3.0 by graduation), is there any hope for me teaching college? Or are grad programs just too competitive? Great thread, it's been really interesting to read so far. I think you can do it. At least as long as you think you can do it. Most grad programs aren't going to heavily weight your pre-cooking GPA, especially if you explain it like you just did: I was in school, didn't really interest me, did something else, got back in, and now I'm a loving house on fire. I can't speak to what everyone does. But were I admitting into my own, private graduate school, I'd be looking for the people with what it takes to run the marathon. Some straight-through students have this, but many don't, or don't know they do. So I'd place a heavy bet on the person who's been out in the world, had a career, and chose grad school instead. That's a guy who wants to learn, who's not doing grad school because his advisor said he could and he's scared of the real world.
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Aug 27, 2009 01:47
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bartlebee posted:So, I've started my Introduction to Theatre Arts (THE 101) this week, and I've had some success so far. One of our core assignments is a trio of response papers. The students see the three productions from the school's theatre season, and they write a paper for each responding to a particular prompt. Our final production this semester is Macbeth. For an introductory class, filled with students who are non-majors and may not have read Shakespeare, how much time would you goons spend going over the play specifically? We have time set aside to "teach" the play, and I'm wondering how much time you'd spend explaining and clarifying as opposed to articulating text points. I'm thinking I might set aside a couple of lecture periods (fifty minutes) to go through the script act by act, and explain/clarify plot points. After that, I think we might spend a day or two discussing specific thematic questions. To keep it tangible: I'ma say a good response to a production looks more like quote:The second encounter with the witches was less dark and threatening than I've seen in other productions... than quote:The second encounter with the witches is another place where the theme of time was emphasized. The first leads to a well-anchored reading that focuses on the stage, while the second can lean too much on the text. So I think I'd spend most of my class time on scene-by scene comparisons between different productions, or acting scenes out in class. I'd bet yet another piece of me that focusing on matters in the text would get me responses that deal principally with the text which, for this assignment, hits somewhere beside the mark. You want responses to the action on stage. To keep things manageable, I'd concentrate on points where interpretations of the play really show their differences -- Lady M's first entrance, "dagger," Lady M's scolding Mackers after he starts waffling, Banquo's ghost, the second encounter with the witches, "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow," and so on. That way, your students have clear moments to focus on instead of trying to take in the whole of the production.
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Aug 29, 2009 02:58
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I recently graduated from a small liberal arts school with an BA in English and History, and I joined Americorps for a year to work with troubled kids at a local community college. I'm in the process of applying to a Masters program in English lit for next year and wanted some recommendations on keeping sharp in the meantime. Do you have any suggestions for writing or reading exercises I should practice? Or some reading recommendations? If this has been asked before, I apologize. This is also a wonderful thread!
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Aug 30, 2009 23:23
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What is essential reading for advanced study of PL?
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Aug 30, 2009 23:54
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DJ Tanuki posted:I recently graduated from a small liberal arts school with an BA in English and History, and I joined Americorps for a year to work with troubled kids at a local community college. I'm in the process of applying to a Masters program in English lit for next year and wanted some recommendations on keeping sharp in the meantime. Do you have any suggestions for writing or reading exercises I should practice? Or some reading recommendations? There was a question a bit like this about a million years ago, and I recommended a bunch of general-interest books on canon criticism -- Bloom's Western Canon and so on. So you can go that route. But I think the most important thing is that you research, read, and write daily. And I've found it best to have some set of definite goals to work toward with all three. Normally that's a book project, but because my relationship with my publisher's contentious right now, I'm blogging and writing articles. But you could just as easily write notes -- like you'd see in English Language Notes or Modern Language Notes. These are short (~500-1500 word) articles that expound on a single, tightly-focused point about some small part of a text -- authorship, the meaning of a troublesome word or phrase, editing traditions, and so on. If you set a goal of writing a note a week, the reading and research parts of the job should set themselves up nicely. For note writing you'd need access to at least an OED and some journals. But the nice thing about college libraries is they let anyone in. As long as you don't try to take anything out with you, you can do all the research you want. What I think I'm saying is that notes make an ideal keeping-sharp project because they're small scale and as easy or difficult as you want to make them, which means you can set yourself clear and realistic deadlines. You can also write them about nearly any point on any text, so they're easily fit to your interests and current reading.
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Aug 31, 2009 00:37
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Grouco posted:What is essential reading for advanced study of PL? The must-read book on Lost has got to be Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin -- it's very, very strong reader-response reading of Lost that's touched almost every piece of criticism on the text for the past three decades. Barbara Lewalski's work is also required reading -- I'm thinking Protestant Poetics, though her biography (Life of John Milton) is also the best available. And I'd throw Empson's Milton's God on that list of relatively recent and now foundational criticism. Newer Milton criticism has been more interesting than field-shaking, though. Blair Hoxby's Mammon's Music has spurred some conversation. Might be worth a read if it's easy to get. Also -- and I'm ending with this for emphasis -- the Cambridge Companion to Milton is probably the best of the CC series and a hell of an overview of both background and critical tradition. If you get one backgrounding text, get this. The topical reading list it includes is both up-to-date and delightfully selective, and should help you figure out where to go next.
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Aug 31, 2009 00:53
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Brainworm, this thread is amazing and incredibly informative. Thank you for your time and your insights. A friend of mine is starting his student teaching as a High School English teacher within the next week. What advice would you give him so he doesn't fall into the trap of "two-level" readings? Also, what do you think is most important in High School English classes?
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Aug 31, 2009 07:47
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Quote posted:A friend of mine is starting his student teaching as a High School English teacher within the next week. What advice would you give him so he doesn't fall into the trap of "two-level" readings? The easiest, useful things are concentrate on character motivations (why does Hamlet leap into Ophelia's grave?), structure (do these poems follow a formal pattern? How are those patterns alike or different?), and reader response (how did you react to this? What happened in the text that made you react that way?). The more you set the students up as individual interpreters of the text, the more you get away from that terrible I-know-the-secret-meaning-of-this-text game that seems to get played in HSE classrooms. quote:Also, what do you think is most important in High School English classes? Writing, without question. And by writing, I mean writing with purpose, where students have a clear idea of what their learning goals are before they set hand to keyboard. It helps if those goals have a realistic determiner (write poems to submit to this journal; write notes or narratives for such-and-such publication; write a short article for this website). In a well-constructed writing assignment, all the other skills you want students to develop -- research, say -- are going to be necessary for successful completion of the piece. So spend a deal of time on what students are supposed to do, and let them figure out the how for themselves. Figuring out how, that's the most important part of the process. That's how they learn to solve field problems.
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Aug 31, 2009 16:22
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Would just like to say that not only is your blog post on revenge tragedies really interesting and perceptive but Rolling Vengeance looks awesome and I'm going to try to track down a copy.
Danny Cadaver fucked around with this message at 19:46 on Aug 31, 2009 |
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Aug 31, 2009 19:43
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Danny Cadaver posted:Would just like to say that not only is your blog post on revenge tragedies really interesting and perceptive but Rolling Vengeance looks awesome and I'm going to try to track down a copy. You can get it -- along with both seasons of 18 Wheels of Justice -- at Truckerflicks.
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Aug 31, 2009 22:39
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Yeah the blog is p. awesome. I'd still like to know if you've tried to do anything to gen. ed. at your school. Pages back you talked about what you think gen. ed. ought to be and do. Have you tried to sell those changes to your school administrators? Have you run into fierce resistance or problems with practicality? This is something I get interested in because my own general education was just slightly better than useless. And it's downright onerous for people who don't have AP credits to throw around.
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Aug 31, 2009 23:03
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Boner Logistics posted:Yeah the blog is p. awesome. Well, I think the bits that I said about Gen Ed. earlier are probably close to party line for my school -- others might have tweaks here and there, but I don't think anyone would be in downright opposition. That said, our current GE practices miss some important marks. And everyone knows it. So I got on board a GE assessment matter -- got a grant from Teagle to measure outcomes, do some tests, and get an idea of what our students develop from the beginning to the end of our GE sequence. That way, any GE changes can be informed by where our current system succeeds and fails. I cannot overstate how slow this measurement and redesign process will be. I mean, a GE revision is probably going to be chiefly ideologically driven -- students should do more of this or that because it's inherently valuable. But I want to make sure that our current successes and failures shape what happens, too. But that means having data with some weight. So, realistically, we've got another two years of measuring outcomes, plus another two years to design and run new metrics that'll answer questions raised by the first set of measurements. Then we can start talking about a GE redesign. Best case, that redesign takes a full year -- probably two -- and rolls out over the course of four years as students graduate under the old system. So call it seven years through the GE redesign, and a decade before students graduate under the new system. In short, then, I'm part of the beginning of a GE redesign, but what shape that redesign takes, and when, is over the horizon. It's far enough out that I don't like to think about how much work it'll be.
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Sep 1, 2009 01:10
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Brainworm posted:Well, I think the bits that I said about Gen Ed. earlier are probably close to party line for my school -- others might have tweaks here and there, but I don't think anyone would be in downright opposition. I'd be really interested to hear more about this as it unfolds. My university is a huge believer in general education, and although I love the way it's done here, I'd love to hear about how a gen-ed revamp might play out elsewhere. And while we're talking gen ed: I read your earlier posts on the subject, but I don't think you mentioned what sort of system you favor in the now-age-old "distribution requirements vs. specially-designed courses" gen ed debate. Any chance you could weigh in on that?
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Sep 1, 2009 02:25
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Here's a question regarding a paper topic I'm interested in doing for my senior project this fall. I'm taking a lot of classes this semester that deal with the periods from middle English to early modern English (Chaucer, Shakespeare, The first half of Brit Lit) and am very interested in how we got from point A to B and what was involved in that shift. I was thinking of doing a paper on it, but I need help in choosing a topic that involves more research and asserting/supporting a hypothesis than droning on about the history of what happened. A teacher in the department suggested possibly reading several translations/modernizations of the same work and forming a commentary on the discrepancies between the editions (specifically he noted Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale," Shakespeare's play "Two Noble Kinsmen," and Dryden's "translation" of "The Knight's Tale"). What are your thoughts on an approach like this? Would you suggest a different text to evaluate, or perhaps another angle entirely? Secondly, I am looking to apply to grad school this fall/winter and am currently getting all my stuff together to do so. Ideally, I am gunning for some type of teaching assistanceship so as to not incur a ton of debt and get some teaching experience. How hard are these to obtain? I'm not really concerned with going to a stellar program as much as I am getting teaching experience and school paid for. Maybe that last part sounds bad, but it is honest. If it helps, I go to a small, not so prestigious school, will have good letters of recommendation, and scored a 630 verbal on the GRE. Lastly, this is a great thread. Thanks for taking the time.
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Sep 1, 2009 02:59
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Bel_Canto posted:I'd be really interested to hear more about this as it unfolds. My university is a huge believer in general education, and although I love the way it's done here, I'd love to hear about how a gen-ed revamp might play out elsewhere. I'll keep it updated, but God help me if this thread goes on that long. quote:And while we're talking gen ed: I read your earlier posts on the subject, but I don't think you mentioned what sort of system you favor in the now-age-old "distribution requirements vs. specially-designed courses" gen ed debate. Any chance you could weigh in on that? I know the implementation's tougher, but I really like specially-designed courses. Frankly, I like Great Books Gen Ed systems. I'm not sure they should carry for more than a year, but the value of common experience in showing students how one college is different from another can't be overestimated. Colleges, especially small colleges, have distinct missions, and it's difficult for distribution requirements to fully and clearly articulate that mission. Second, distribution requirements generally assume that gateway courses to majors are suitable for a general education requirement. And I don't think they are. Just for instance, say you had to teach an Art major a year of math to get along in the world with. You sure as hell wouldn't have him do the same two semesters of Calc. as someone who's gearing up for a Math major; you'd want introductions to stats, business math, and some Calc foundations -- a sort of practical math survey. But in the DR system, that's not usually on the menu.
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Sep 1, 2009 03:57
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Holy christ. The end of the thread at last. I'm wondering if I can bug you for your thoughts on gamelike tropes in story structures. I'm particularly thinking of the zelda-like quality of stories where the hero ends up going through a series of disconnected events in order to accumulate the tools he'll end up needing to resolve his original goal. Like Robin Hood's steady accumulation of friends that form the basis of his army, or Arthur's story (as rewritten by Disney, I guess, though the original stories still have the quality of accumulating the knights, merlin, sword, etc). The reason I ask is because there's a racial memory kind of thing with the boss monster that goes back to hunting big game, and picking up clues, 2ndary sources of nutrition, and tools of opportunity (like a chance to set a trap, or throw a poisoned spear at something) which come from the hunter gatherer post-coital process of dragging the kill home and bragging about it (involving the story of what you did). If you ever dive into the EVE thread in the MMO HMO or dwarf fortress thread you can find examples of stories which derive a plot from inherently unconnected events (outside the intention of the player, I guess), and you can see other examples in the narrative constructed around fandom of a sport (the concept of a 'dynasty' or the projected success or failure of a franchise in a given season which talks about the accumulation of individual players, injuries, experiences, and even interpersonal tensions as if there is a 'big picture' to be had). I suppose you could even include something like Thus Spake Zarathustra in this category, where the main character's proverb-ready experiences accumulate the arguments or audience-credulity which lead Nietzsche to talking up Religion as a story people tell about the game various individuals are playing with each other to get them to do X for Y, or prevent the doing of Z. Saying God is dead, for instance, is functionally similar to Arthur pulling the sword from the stone; doing something impossible to get enough attention to make the subsequent journey. Though I might be overdoing it. In any case, I know Henry V is at least vaguely related to reality, even though it's a hyper patriotic version of events where the King ends up being a lovable prick (which I guess is the best case scenario for royalty--a kind of concession to realism?), but I've never known enough Shakespeare to understand the place of the Welsh guy who he talks to about leaks at the end or why there's a conversation with the english sappers before Henry ends up making the whole 'blowing poo poo up' route to victory pointless by delivering a speech. I bring this up because it's the play I could think of that seems vaguely similar, but in general, the only game-like stories that occur to me are collections of fables, or rough assemblies of myth--and specifically religion, which tends to blur the line between intentional moral philosophy, archaic history, and political record-keeping. Is there a story archetype that's well known that encompasses this, and I'm just not well read enough to have seen it? Or am I full of poo poo? Or whatever. If you read this much, just type up something about how Star Trek is like the tempest in reverse where a foreign universe crashes on the hostile shore of the Enterprise, and Kirk and his crew represent that spirit or whatever it was that was on the island. I forget the specifics.
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Sep 2, 2009 01:01
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Bromadillo posted:Here's a question regarding a paper topic I'm interested in doing for my senior project this fall. I'm taking a lot of classes this semester that deal with the periods from middle English to early modern English (Chaucer, Shakespeare, The first half of Brit Lit) and am very interested in how we got from point A to B and what was involved in that shift. I was thinking of doing a paper on it, but I need help in choosing a topic that involves more research and asserting/supporting a hypothesis than droning on about the history of what happened. A teacher in the department suggested possibly reading several translations/modernizations of the same work and forming a commentary on the discrepancies between the editions (specifically he noted Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale," Shakespeare's play "Two I'd suggest following the development of a single idea or character type, rather than a single text, since that gets you more granularity. Maybe look at the evolution of the Vice figure in medieval morality plays, his descendants in early Renaissance drama (King Johan, Ralph Roister-Doister), Marlovian and Shakespearean-era drama (Falstaff, Barabas, Richard III, Iago), and so on through the Late Renaissance and Restoration. This lets you make -- and actually makes necessary -- more sophisticated interpretive claims, since the evolution of these figures is more complex and less obvious. Also, it gives you a wider variety of texts and authors to work with. quote:Secondly, I am looking to apply to grad school this fall/winter and am currently getting all my stuff together to do so. Ideally, I am gunning for some type of teaching assistanceship so as to not incur a ton of debt and get some teaching experience. How hard are these to obtain? I'm not really concerned with going to a stellar program as much as I am getting teaching experience and school paid for. Maybe that last part sounds bad, but it is honest. If it helps, I go to a small, not so prestigious school, will have good letters of recommendation, and scored a 630 verbal on the GRE. A teaching assistantship isn't going to be a problem if you cast your application net widely enough, and especially if you're looking at larger State University programs. PhDs.org has a good set of information on what these programs pay, what the teaching expectations are like, and what the job market look like for graduates. That might be a little irregular now because of the economic crisis, but especially State Universities are countercyclical -- they'll see more people going back to school as undergraduates after a job loss, which means more sections of freshman comp, which means more of a need for grad students. quote:Lastly, this is a great thread. Thanks for taking the time. Glad it works for you. It's helping me keep myself adjusted during start-of-class season. I know I'm in bad shape when the prospective students' moms start to look hot.
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Sep 2, 2009 02:24
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TheCosmicMuffet posted:Holy christ. The end of the thread at last. You're telling me. I occasionally dig back through it wondering whether I talked about something, and it's a motherfucker. Sure, there are better tools for that, but the digging's kinda cool on its own. quote:I'm wondering if I can bug you for your thoughts on gamelike tropes in story structures. [..] This is so far outside my ken that I can't give you a good answer. I know most video games by hearsay, since I went straight from the Atari 2600 to the Wii. And, truth be told, I still play a bit too much 2600 for a sane man. Normally that wouldn't stop me from trying to answer you, except that a close friend of mine, Harry Brown at DePauw, literally wrote the book on this. It's Videogames and Education, and I'm sure your local college library either has it or can get it. Failing that, once class starting calms down, I could probably talk him into answering your question or something like it. He owes me about five million beers. quote:Or am I full of poo poo? Or whatever. If you read this much, just type up something about how Star Trek is like the tempest in reverse where a foreign universe crashes on the hostile shore of the Enterprise, and Kirk and his crew represent that spirit or whatever it was that was on the island. I forget the specifics. I don't know from Star Trek, but Forbidden Planet is a nice Tempest rewrite. Actually, it's more like a modernization. And it has that robot from Lost In Space in it, plus Leslie Nielson as a young man. And special effects by Walt Disney. And a trippy-rear end anti-harmonic electronic soundtrack.
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Sep 2, 2009 02:39
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What do you think (if anything) about Joseph Campbell?
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Sep 2, 2009 18:43
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Brainworm posted:I don't know from Star Trek, but Forbidden Planet is a nice Tempest rewrite. Actually, it's more like a modernization. And it has that robot from Lost In Space in it, plus Leslie Nielson as a young man. And special effects by Walt Disney. And a trippy-rear end anti-harmonic electronic soundtrack. And the robot helpers from Blackhole, possibly the greatest scifi piece no one has ever heard about.
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Sep 2, 2009 20:43
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Peter Bosbon posted:What do you think (if anything) about Joseph Campbell? The only work of his I've read is Hero With a Thousand Faces (and some pieces of Masks of God), and that was back when I gave a poo poo about Star Wars. So whenever I think about Campbell, there's a complex back and forth. On one hand, I don't like archetype-style criticism. It doesn't really account for the reader's role in shaping overheard or interpreted mythologies. That is, I as a listener have a tendency to emplot the stories I hear according to the logics of the stories I know, in much the same way a twelfth century monk might have understood every story he heard as doctrinal allegory. So that complicates Campbell's process for me. And while I like Campbell's central idea -- that myths should, or at least can, be understood in the context of other myths -- this plays out with a kind of categorical confusion. I mean, what exactly is a myth? Campbell seems to assume that you can get a snapshot of a mythology, that there's a time and place where a story has standing as a myth, and times and places where it doesn't. And this razor for exclusion from the mythological "canon" affects what you find when you look for archetypes. For instance, how do I read Christian mythology? Are Prosperity Gospel renditions of Christ's life part of this? Mormons? Scientologists? That's hot, but you get the same problem if you look at Greek mythology. How do you decide which versions of that mythology -- or which retelling of a given myth -- have standing? That's not as direct a criticism of Campbell, and weighs more on Masks than Hero, but you can see how it causes problems.
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Sep 3, 2009 01:07
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Yes, the last post was from five days ago but I just recently discovered this thread, which was amazing, and wanted to ask your thoughts on Nabokov. You earlier mentioned Pale Fire and he seems fairly up your alley in terms of thoughts on characters and development and distaste of symbols.
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Sep 7, 2009 18:43
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Pontius Pilate posted:Yes, the last post was from five days ago but I just recently discovered this thread, which was amazing, and wanted to ask your thoughts on Nabokov. You earlier mentioned Pale Fire and he seems fairly up your alley in terms of thoughts on characters and development and distaste of symbols. I don't even know what to say about Nabokov. I mean, just in terms of style, he's probably the single most influential Anglophone novelist of the 20th century -- with the possible exception of Hemingway. But I'ma suggest that Hemingway holds his place in the American canon -- you know, as the novelist -- largely by dint of Nabokov's reworking of him. Take The Sun Also Rises, which Nabokov's reworks in Bend Sinister.* Sun isn't really funny. It's absurdity with dangerously sharp edges. Jake's getting his cock shot off isn't the punchline to a joke as much as it's an indictment of the contradictions inherent in modern masculinity. And the whole point of Sun is that laughter isn't a workable response to a political and social tragedy as deep and complex as the war. I mean, the book is about as anti-laughter as it gets. A typical moment's like this: Hemingway posted:She grinned and I saw why she made a point of not laughing. With her mouth closed she was a rather pretty girl. Seriously. The full text of The Sun Also Rises is here. Every time someone laughs (mostly Brett), it's a loving dysfunction. So I imagine that Nabokov saw a problem with Hemingway specifically, and Modernism in general. I mean, the story about the Modernists is that the First World War and the depredations of industrial capitalism were a disaster so horrific that social recovery from them was impossible -- these were, in fact, supposed to comprise the greatest trauma in human history. So what happens after Hemingway and Sassoon and Owen finish their bits about the unfathomable horrors of the First World War? Bamph! Holocaust. Bamph! Nuclear war. Bamph! Stalin. So Bend Sinister takes what The Sun Also Rises does -- the intimately personal relationship to political tragedy -- and adapts it so it's capable of dealing with an entirely different class of social tragedy. Bend Sinister's a farce, but with the understanding that farce (and a kind of humor) can be meaningful literary responses to the horrors of dictatorship-driven genocide. So the political absurdity in Bend is weighty, and it's bleak, but it's different. However bad things get, you can still think or write your way out from them by accepting that, well, they're fundamentally stupid. So you laugh it up. The Titus Andronicus response. I'm not going to point-by-point Bend against Sun, but it should be clear that Bend's rewriting of Hemingway makes Sun the starting point for a tradition of (especially American) farcical war novels. Catch 22 is probably the best known of these, but Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K., O'Brien's Things They Carried, and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow are all direct descendants of Bend Sinister. They're indirect descendants of The Sun Also Rises, but only because Bend Sinister is there to provide some kind of interpretive continuity. In other words, Hemingway's only a link in that chain because Nabokov rewrote him and everyone else rewrote Nabokov. And that's just one of Nabokov's less-weighty books. I don't even know where I'd start with something like Lolita, which is part rewriting of Paradise Lost (sympathy for the Humbert/devil, but also a re-enactment of Satan's obsession with the innocent Eve) or Pale Fire (commentary on the act of writing -- you're always footnoting, right?). So that's where I'll leave it. Nabokov's a stylistic giant. And he's deeply loving literate. Both of those are like the understatements of the decade. * This is my favorite Nabokov piece, incidentally.
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Sep 7, 2009 23:03
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Brainworm posted:I don't even know what to say about Nabokov. I mean, just in terms of style, he's probably the single most influential Anglophone novelist of the 20th century -- with the possible exception of Hemingway. But I'ma suggest that Hemingway holds his place in the American canon -- you know, as the novelist -- largely by dint of Nabokov's reworking of him. Part of me suspected you'd like Bend Sinister the most but for its fun with Hamlet. As long as we're on Nabokov (guess who my favorite author is), have you read Pnin? I always wanted a real-life, genuine academic's opinion on its portrayal of academia. And like Bend Sinister it's both heart-wrenching and hilarious.
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Sep 7, 2009 23:23
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Pontius Pilate posted:Part of me suspected you'd like Bend Sinister the most but for its fun with Hamlet. As long as we're on Nabokov (guess who my favorite author is), have you read Pnin? I always wanted a real-life, genuine academic's opinion on its portrayal of academia. And like Bend Sinister it's both heart-wrenching and hilarious. Yeah. I'm teaching this course on Shakespeare adaptations and rewritings right now, and I keep thinking Bend Sinister is a good addition. But right now I'm still on Lunar Park; it might not be the better book, but I think it's a better reworking. And I haven't read Pnin, though through some conspiracy of events you're like the third person to mention it today. So I Amazon'd it along with Garfield Minus Garfield, Interred With Their Bones, Starting Strength, and the entirely of Lurlene McDaniel's One Last Wish series. That's a tough receipt to explain.
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Sep 8, 2009 00:44
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